- cross-posted to:
- vegan@lemmy.world
- unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
- cross-posted to:
- vegan@lemmy.world
- unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
Boiling lobsters while they are alive and conscious will be banned as part of a government strategy to improve animal welfare in England.
Government ministers say that “live boiling is not an acceptable killing method” for crustaceans and alternative guidance will be published.
The practice is already illegal in Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand. Animal welfare charities say that stunning lobsters with an electric gun or chilling them in cold air or ice before boiling them is more humane.
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It’s just silly that this is still a thing in almost 2026. It’s so obvious even Hitler banned it, and he was no animal rights activist.
even Hitler banned it
That’s kinda interesting.
What reasoning did that govt. have?Hitler was a maniac and a despicable person, but I seem to remember reading that he was vegetarian and at least liked dogs. Maybe he was an animal rights activist, provided that you didn’t consider humans animals.
He actually was, despite his horrific treatment of human beings.
More formally, on May 15, 1942, the Nazis issued an order instructing all Jews to bring all of their pets to collection points where they would be euthanized.
Of course if animals were in the care of the “wrong” human beings then they had to be killed. Fascist ideology has always, and will always, be an incoherent mess of contradictions in service of bigotry.
Well, I’ll be damned.
I’ll need to read up on this.
Will always be funny to me that lobsters are such an expensive delicacy at fine dining restaurants when they started out as food for extremely poor people in coastal communities. In the old days the general public viewed eating them as you would view eating a rat today.
Give the tech bros long enough and rat will be a delicacy for the rest of us aswell
It always comes back to demolition man
Not looking forward to the clamshells… maybe lobster claws could be a cheap alternative?
While they were called ‘sea rats’,they werent considered quiteas bad as rats- it was common for servant’s contracts to limit the number of meals lobster could be served to them for, usually 1 or 2 a week, not the hard 0 that serving rat would have been.
Lobster is only ok. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything with lobster in it that wasn’t independently good, or improved in any meaningful way with lobster.
That said, when lobster was viewed the way you’re describing, it was seen as more of a pest. There was so much lobster freely available, it was literally piling up on beaches. No one was fishing for lobsters, they were just scooping them up and then making a rather revolting stew with them. That was being served to prisoners as a form of penance, meant to be bland and unstimulating. Sandy guts and all.
Oysters have made the switch between poor people food and rich people food quite a few times. Tuna has made the switch in my lifetime. It probably has something to do with how easy they are to harvest/catch when plentiful versus the results of overfishing, and how delicate the food is in the supply chain.
Bacon also, it used to be cheap as fuck. Same with chicken wings. Two of the cheapest parts of the animal, now magically nearly the most expensive.
Its both here, cooking bacon is the cheapest boneless meat I have ever seen per weight. But you can also get pretty fancy expensive bacon choices too.
what are you talking about. bacon and chicken wings are cheap. almost every other desirable cut of pig/chicken is more expensive. chicken wings are often 1-2 dollars a lb.
Where are you getting wings that cheap? They’re usually like $3-4 a lb in the south and bacon is usually $6+ a lb…only if you grab it in bulk does bacon go down to like $3.50ish and you’re buying the rejection stuff that doesn’t look pretty but still tastes fine.
the grocery store.
At my grocery store, pork tenderloin and chicken wings are $6/lb, and pork shoulder or chicken breasts are $3/lb. Bacon starts at $5/lb for the scraps.
where i live chicken breasts are 8 dollars a lb. bacon is like 5 bucks for really nice stuff. chicken wings are 2 bucks. thighs are 6 dollars. pork tenderloin is 9.
There’s a theory that carbonara used to be a “war time” food.
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From what I’ve been told lobsters will release a toxin if not killed properly. Boiling alive is/was the easiest way to do it and thus widely adopted especially at consumer level.
Nah, they don’t release a toxin, at least not in the sense of “self-defense” that is usually meant with that phrase. After death they rot very quickly, so they do become toxic, I guess that’s similar enough. My dad cooked lobsters often and he always stuck a paring knife in a very specific spot in the head right before boiling, I assume this information is about to become much more widespread to comply with these new laws.
Put them on ice to slow/sleep them, then slice through the center on the head with a sharp knife.
But their feelings!
Quickly in the sense that bacterial growth on them becomes toxic within a far shorter time than other things we eat. Bacteria isn’t growing in the 10 seconds it takes to kill them and then dump into the pot. Just don’t leave them laying around for a long time.
Apparently it’s not easy to kill lobsters. They don’t have a single brain that you can drive a nail through like mammals, AFAIK.
One of the researchers who showed that lobsters feel pain recommended freezing them as the best available method, but maybe it’s better to just stop eating them?
Edit: the article says that electrical stunning works.
Electrical stunning isn’t an option for home chefs. I have heard of chilling but not sure if that is also being banned in the UK or not, given that they would still be alive. And yeah, no idea how reliable someone is going to be in actually killing it and not just rendering it unable to move but still feeling everything.
Even if a perfect knife cut works, how precise do you need to be? The best method would be the one which is pretty easy to do successfully. Also what about other crustaceans?
whoa, you mean sentient animals feel pain?? WHAT!?
Nah, the screaming in horror is just air escaping /s
I would hardly call crustaceans sentient, let alone conscious. FFS, they hardly have brains.
Lobsters don’t have vocal cords. Its physically impossible for them to scream.
Ok but that isn’t really the point they were making
That was literally a point they made.
pushes glasses Well akshually… 🤓
So exhausting. I can’t believe we have to explain boiling animals alive is animal cruelty, against a sea of “bugs lol who cares” and joking about inconsequential details. It’s sad
It’s a fucking bug! Boil it and eat the shit already.
I worked at Red Lobster for a number of years as a young’un. A large part of my work in the prep kitchen initially (after I graduated from the dish ring) was to slice live Maine lobs in half to make “princess lobsters” (half a lobster with body cavity stuffed with yummy). These stupid bugs are no more sentient than a cockroach that you smash with a shoe.
Why would anyone spend even a second considering the feelings of a fucking bug?!
What if they feel every moment? Can’t go out of your way for 2 minutes to potentially reduce the suffering?
Yes, they feel every moment until the knife slices their pea-sized nerve center of a brain in half. That took about 1/2 of a second. It’s done and now we can eat.
Your original comment made it seem as though you were not slicing their pea-brains in half, just boiling them alive (this was cleared up in your follow-up).
Having said that, there may be worse ways to go. In the first season of Shogun they put a guy in a large cauldron of water and slowly brought it up to a boil.
But then I remember that MrBallen story where the guy was pushed into an NYC storm drain and was steamed alive for several minutes in agony. From what I remember, steam isn’t like fire where your nerves are essentially cauterized do you can’t feel anything. You have to suffer through every minute of it.
Let’s just agree to all show each other the courtesy of a knife to the brain.
Lobsters don’t have a centralised brain. Shows just how much you know about lobsters.
No matter how many of them you have killed and cooked, that clearly doesn’t make you a biology expert…
So basically everything you said, can be discarded as an uninformed garbage opinion.
58 downvotes
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
The science would tend to disagree with you.
All the evidence points to the fact that lobsters do feel pain in the same way humans do. As they’re being boiled alive they release significant amounts of cortisol, the same as us.
Bug or not, it is sentient. If we are going to insist on eating them then we have a moral responsibility to minimise their suffering before we do.
Do you waffle about before taking a slipper to the roach that snuck in under your door-jamb? No, you smash that repugnant shit and scoop it up with a piece of junk mail to toss it in the toilet. That sentient bug is just not food to you. The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being.
You are missing the point dude. Boiling alive is slow torture, they are not sa…
Fuck it good luck with your reading comprehension skills
I also don’t waffle about a shoe on a cockroach, in fact I try my best to kill them as fast as possible and in any case will choose a shoe to spray, which takes longer. No point in making anyone or anything squirm in agony over several minutes unless I have a personal vendetta against them.
“The fact that a lobster is food does not make it a more elevated being”
And I never said it did. I said the fact that it has an observable and measurable pain response makes it a more elevated being.
Lobsters are sentient, the science has proven it. They might be on the lower end but they have also been shown to demonstrate a limited form of memory and intelligence when it comes to things like pain, avoiding objects that are known to cause it.
I get not caring, but mate, you sound like an absolute psychopath who takes delight in killing them.
No, you smash that repugnant shit
Sounds like a very quick way to kill it.
I feel the need to point out that the person you’re arguing with is not saying you shouldn’t kill lobsters.
The same? That’s a completely unbelievable conclusion to reach. The priorities of some people seems like mental illness to me.
Humans and other mammals release cortisol as part of the pain response.
So do lobsters.
They feel pain when they are boiled alive.
That alone should be enough information for a sane person to think “huh, if they feel pain maybe I should put in a small amount of effort to make sure they don’t suffer when I kill them” instead of trying to justify why it’s ok and use thinly veiled insults aimed at those of us who don’t think animals suffering from avoidable pain is acceptable.
Disregarding the pain of something just because it doesnt have a cute face or fur is far more evidence of mental illness tbh.
The presence of cortisol does not mean that the experience of pain is equitable between humans and lobsters.
It certainly indicates it. It’s certainly a much more plausible explanation than not feeling anything. Fucking strawman argument so thst you can, what, save 2 minutes of your time and not have to kill it humanely?
We used to perform surgery on infant humans without anaesthetics because we believed them to be lesser beings incapable of feeling pain. Scientific consensus shifted.
There is no living creature, plant or animal, that doesn’t have feedback systems that inform on injury and damage. It may not be in a form that we recognize as pain, but in effect that is what it is.
Nothing lives without affecting the lives of other creatures, but we can do our best to minimize suffering. For lobsters it’s probably ideal to freeze or shock them, as mentioned in the article.
To be fair they didn’t deny it had feelings, they made it clear they don’t care about their feelings.
Bro you sound like an absolute psychopath.
If somebody is saying that to you (like right now) perhaps you should reflect on what you’ve said
I’ve worked in restaurants, so I’m used to a certain level of psychopathising among chefs. I don’t know if it’s changed in the last two decades, but in that context I interpreted their comment as being slightly grumpy at being told how to do their jobs.
If they gleefully talked about using the live animal as a sex toy, for example, that would arrive in my brain as an allusion to romantic difficulties.
Just putting that out there. The whole argument looks like cultural differences to me. I don’t think any chef would actually prefer animal cruelty… I did once hear a maître’d joke that cruelty makes food taste better, though.
Okay, so I have a guy in a chef hat fucking a lobster image in my head. Thanks….
A spoonful of sugar, I always say
They prefer animal cruelty in the “I had to do it, so you should too!” kind of way.
Because people have gone just as far to the left as those to the right. Meanwhile the rest of us are just trying to live our lives with what little we have yet somehow everything we do to make our living easier is an inconvenience to those on both extremes.
This is a left/right thing?!! WTF? This just a food thing and if you are left/righting it you are a world-class dolt!
They believe compassion and empathy are “woke”
Nah, people that say this (horseshoe theory etc) are exclusively right wing and are grasping at straws to claim we’re just like them.
Which we’re not.
I’d even kill Nazis quickly.
with what little we have
Like lobster.
Who will think about the poor individuals that can only afford lobster and a pot, but not a freezer?
Boiling lobsters is barbaric. You should steam them
Nigel Farage would know “authoritarian control freakery” when he sees it. I think it’s unsettling for him to see it coming from someone else.
Man you guys are tackling the real issues.
I like this
Honestly that seems pretty reasonable. Boiling things alive is pretty barbaric.
I feel like chilling them is even worse. They usually live in cold waters, and chilling them in cold air (like a fridge) will just mostly make them suffocate for a while before you boil them alive. They can live a long time out of the water in a cold environment/on ice (think 24 to 48 hours long, not 2 or 3) because it just slows down their biological processes since they’re cold blooded. They’re just going to warm up again as they’re boiling, and it will probably take longer to start boiling as they have to come back up from a lower temperature.
Even the shock method seems kinda useless. It would need to knock them out for about 20 minutes to ensure that they’re unconscious until they’re dead.
The most humane thing to do would be to kill them somehow in one moment, like with a concussive force or stabbing through the brain stem, but that then runs into the issue of how quickly dead lobsters go bad (also the issue of presentation - people don’t want a crushed lobster staring at them from their plate). It’s actually illegal in plenty of places to sell dead lobsters (or even cook them!) due to this, so they would have to be killed on site just before being cooked, which is a tall order when 1lb of lobster meat requires about 5lbs of lobster to make (roughly about a 20% yield on lobsters) and it takes about 5 years for a lobster to reach 1lb in size (and then about 2 years for every pound after that).
All of this said, it’s all still probably more humane than that one company I used to work with back when I was in this kind of industry that was experimenting with getting raw lobster meat out of lobsters by tossing them into a pressure vessel.
Yeah, I don’t really have enough knowledge to offer a solution beyond “if we can’t kill them in a humane way, maybe we just don’t need to eat lobster.”
boiled potatoes are barbaric, agree. roasting and frying is the way to go
dumb
Uh, does anyone in this thread even know how to kill a lobster?
I feel like this is barely a problem, you usually slice into its head and then immediately boil to avoid any chance of rapid bacteria breakdown. I dont even know if theres any other practical method aside from boiling without slicing into the head.
Also not to be that guy, but is this really such a massive concern that the government needs to focus on right now? Seems like they are more concerned about handling lobsters than their own citizens after they labeled Palestine Action a terrorist group and had anyone supporting them arrested and charged as such.
Lobsters have a decentralized nervous system, so stabbing it in the head doesn’t really do anything. It’s pretty much just something chefs started doing to appear to know more than the home cook. There’s no scientific reason for stabbing them first.
This is why the correct method is splitting, where you cut the head in half down the middle and partway into the main body. Cutting the head off still leaves a significant chuck of the “brain” alive and unwell.
So, how WOULD you kill it without pain?
Give them a shot of morphine first
Lol I could see this becoming a delicacy- lobster that gets you high when you eat it
Not at all would be fine.
Sure. But, like, is this law pointless? Because unless it bans it altogether (and the comment I replied to is correct about the pain) then it sounds like it’s pointless.
People said freezing. But that just sounds like more psuedo science. Is it science based? Or is it just “people say”.
Freezing just slows them down. A lot of lobsters are caught in the Atlantic around Maine, they can handle your fridge just fine, and your freezer for a painfully long amount of time.
So then not only are you still boiling them alive, but you are also causing a lot of pain by unnecessarily stabbing their face off?
This is how I found out that lobsters don’t have a single centralized brain like humans do.
Lobster as Lemmy mascot when?
Also not to be that guy, but is this really such a massive concern that the government needs to focus on right now?
Labour is flailing. They came into office with an enormous popular mandate to undo the corrupt and abusive practices of the Conservative government, then proceeded to extend and cement these same unpopular policies while engaging in all the same corrupt practices - in many cases taking money and gifts from the exact same people.
This is what they’ve got. Haphazardly pandering to any special interest group that won’t step on the toes of a mega-donor or trip over graft being committed by another influential MP.
Seems like they are more concerned about handling lobsters than their own citizens after they labeled Palestine Action a terrorist group and had anyone supporting them arrested and charged as such.
AIPAC fully has its hooks into the Labour government, especially at the leadership level. In many ways, the sanction on boiled lobster and the sanction on Palestine Rights activists is coming from the same place. A need to crank up policing on everyone everywhere for anything that can justify a government sanction.
The UK police state is metasticizing again.
Worked at Red Lobster back in the 90s. The cook would just flip it over, split it down the middle and gut it. 5 seconds, it’s dead as a rock.
Yeah they also do things like that with other animals also, the point of the legislation is we have science showing animals (and fish also after bad science before) feel pain. And we are far enough in history where we can be a kinder species.
Maybe the citizens have been asking for them to deal with lobbyists and they just misheard
I do think it’d be more humane to not boil lobbyists alive. We can find less grotesque ways to dispatch them.
I for one think it’s highly appropriate
I think boiling is a little too traditional for me. Personally I think the good old fashioned French methods cut just right, you know?
I worked at a country club that would, occasionally, and on the hush hush for VIPS inject them still live, with a syringe of boiling butter, poaching them from the inside out. I believe that is the old fashioned French method
Most people don’t cook lobster and those that do cook it once a year.
No, they don’t know how to kill a lobster. They buy it at the store, it sits in the fridge for half a day or two an they toss in in boiling water.
My middle school home economics teacher told us the story of her cooking lobster for the first time. She thought they killed them for you when you get them at the grocery store.
She got home and opened the bag to find two live lobsters. The only pot she had big enough was glass. She watched those two lobsters boil to death and never had lobster again.
I feel like most people who actually cook live lobsters know what they are doing. Who else buys a live lobster?
Anyone with a few bucks and a grocery store nearby that carries them? I am happy to say that this is pretty rare. As a kid in the 90’s it felt like every grocery store had live lobsters for sale.
It’s about as massive a thing as plastic straws and that annyoing little tab in all caps now.
The best I know is to freeze them first, not like solid, but just for an hour or so which makes them super lethargic.
You can just put them in the fridge. They don’t need to be in the freezer.
Then drive a knife through their head. Dead before they know what’s happening.
Ikr. They stopped the lobsters from being slowly boiled alive but not their own citizens lol
i guess the moral question is whether that’s arguably significantly more humane than skipping the severing step. to me it seems possibly unknowable; either way the thing does suffer the slaughter and the question is to what degree. if there’s any culinary or other practical advantage to doing it, and folks believe it’s more humane, why not…
It’s such a non issue to dispatch a lobster before throwing it into the pot using your method. The guys who are against it are just fucking assholes.
You can have more than one law being established at once.
There has been systematic reduction in the humanities/philosophy, arts, literature etc. In countries. The affect it has is a society focused on work and compliance with status quo. (The USA is actively destroying their own system purposly)
A law ending cruelty should be celebrated as a glimmer of hope that we as a society are still capably of thinking at a higher level, that we are still questioning life, and meanings around it. If we cease to do those things we will be a dead automata society that lives only to work.
focus
How much “focus” does something like this actually require?
Killed a lobster? I’ve never even tasted one. Sounds like a rich people problem.
Honestly not missing much. I don’t get all the fuss, plenty of other seafood that imo tastes loads better.
Lobsters used to be poor people’s food. The taste is really just giant shrimp.
1800s new England, they were refered to as sea rats, and it was a common clause in servants contracts limiting how many meals a week they could be given lobster.
it was a common clause in servants contracts limiting how many meals a week they could be given lobster
Can you imagine, hahaa
Two ways to dispatch a lobster.
One is to put the knife behind the eyes, stab down and chop towards the front of the lobster, bifurcating the head.
The other is to put the lobster in the freezer for 30-45 minutes. This slows its metabolism to the point of practical death, so it doesnt feel anything when you put it in the boiling water.
second option is less…actively choppy, so i imagine most squeemish people would prefer that option.
oof i’d take the head chop over being rapidly frozen and then boiled, thanks
Cause you’re not cold blooded, or a lobster. So you don’t have the same response to it that they do.
Valid point but you cant prove that im not either of those things
i can’t prove you’re not coffee either
they also got that lobster gun that does the choppy for you if you’re doing it in bulk or are squeamish
Good.
While they are alive and conscious.
That’s why I fill my lobsters with propofol before cooking them. People always say my dinner parties are a snooze. I don’t know why, I always have a good time. Of course, I don’t eat lobster.
So let me get this straight, rather than almost immediately killing them by dropping them in boiling water, instead we’re supposed to slowly freeze them to death first? That’s supposed to be more humane?
Since not killing them doesn’t even seem to be an option…
You want us to eat them while they’re still alive?
The amount of people that are in knots trying to defend a barbaric practice is quite telling.
Chopping down plants & eating them is also barbaric.
Yes agreed so lets just starve then, only proper thing to do
Just learn to photosynthesize like that guy obviously does
Nah, you starve. You’re the one who’s into that stuff.
Do plants feel pain the way a lobster would? I genuinely don’t know.
I do know that making an animal suffer rather than giving it a quick death is wrong.
Do plants feel pain?
From what I’ve read so far, unfortunately, it seems like they might. Plants can communicate with each other and form underground resource networks with other plants, fungi, and microorganisms. Including for illness, boring bugs and pain responses. The smell of fresh cut grass is one of those warning/pain responses.
I’ve wanted to do some bonsai succulents, but the process towards any living thing seems cruel and painful.
Now this I can agree with.
